EcoAdvocates: Welcome to Your New World. It's Hell.

by Aji

Tonight, I'm going to a take a slightly different approach.  The subsequent segments will each contain action items, and I hope you'll follow through on each and every one.  But the lead segment will not ask you to do anything particularly time-consuming.  

In fact, it will not ask you to take any action at all, save one:  It will ask you to bear witness.

Notice that I did not say that it will not be difficult.

[Editor's note:  What follows includes graphic imagery.]

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EcoAdvocates: A Declaration of Interdependence

by citisven

Independence is a big and important word in this country. A noble concept in and of itself, it reaches far and deep into the American psyche. The U.S.'s independence as a nation is supported by a rugged individualism among her people that has enabled many to do things that would otherwise be considered impossible. Accordingly, to immigrants like myself, the U.S. is known as the land of unlimited possibility in our native countries.

However, in the last century this independence, rooted in material freedom and mobility, has come at an ever-increasing cost: The dependence on fossil fuels and all the problems associated with it. From fighting wars in oil rich countries, to epic oil spills, to climate change, our ostensible emancipation from the constraints of nature that enabled us to go it alone is coming back to bite us.

In tonight's EcoAdvocates, I'd like to wander past the "dependence vs. independence" paradigm and discuss a third and perhaps middle way of how we might live in balance with the earth's ecosystem without losing our creativity and autonomy: Interdependence

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Help Obama fight fossil fuel polluters.

by rb137

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ecoadvocates: 10:10 Global Guest Bloggers & YOU!

by boatsie

Tonight's EcoAdvocates edition is the first guest diary in a collaboration between Ecoadvocates and 10:10 Global leading up to and reporting back on 10.10.10 Global Day of Action.

Tonight's editor, boatsie hosts a series of 10:10 bloggers,including Cian O'Donovan, 10:10 Global Social Network Coordinator, Jill MacIntyre, 10:10 Global US Coordinator, and 10:10 posts from Ghana, the Balkans and Adriatic and the UK.  Have you signed up at 10:10 global yet? Found a work party near you? Figured out how you, your workplace, home, school or community can cut carbon emissions by 10% beginning in 2010? Not yet, well, you're about to find out how.

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EcoAdvocates: Our Toxic Lives

by Jill Richardson

I've been doing some research on toxic chemicals that Americans are exposed to lately and ... WOW! Turns out that, without any consent from me, I've been exposed to a long list of highly toxic chemicals from things I thought were harmless like my couch. So were you. It could be your socks, or your toothpaste. Or perhaps your washing machine. So why the hell are these chemicals legal?

More below.

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EcoAdvocates: A green model in the Gulf

by Meteor Blades

Five years ago, a natural disaster plus human callousness and ineptitude combined to kill more than 1800 people on the Gulf Coast and plunged an American city into a nightmare from which it has far from fully recovered. Thousands of New Orleanians still live in homesick exile. Four of the hospitals that once served the east side of the city remain permanently closed. Crime is out of control. We had a chance right then, as a nation, to make the catastrophe of 2005 into a flex moment, a window of opportunity not merely to rebuild but rather to go boldly in a new direction, a green trajectory that would restore greater New Orleans and the Katrina-obliterated towns of  Mississippi to ecological health with sustainable economies.

But, of course, the Cheney-Bush administration was in office and it had other fish to fry. Once it had completed the botch-job of its immediate response and handed out a few bucks and a few FEMA trailers, it more or less vanished from the scene. As for spurring a move down a green path in a big way, puhleez. Those were the days when the White House was still in its climate-change denier phase. Local politicians suffered their own form of myopia.

This year’s disaster along the Gulf Coast offers us another flex moment. But we can easily ignore this one, too, if we don’t wise up. And you can already taste that unwise attitude in the air. The attitude which says that the roiling gush of oil into the Gulf will probably never spew from that particular well again so we can just do a little more work with the mops and get back to business as usual. Whew! Sure, residual oil in unknown quantities clings to the sea floor, unknown long-term effects may afflict the Gulf’s water-dwelling creatures, unknown damage may be done to those who depend on those creatures for a living, and a hydrocarbons driller or two may screw up another high-tech puncture. But, every day, with the obvious crisis gone - the one with the camera focused on it - these and other problems will capture less and less attention.

We’re told, obviously so, that the immediate tasks in a disaster are to save lives, save livelihoods and prevent bad effects from becoming worse. Emergencies are no time to start rewriting the CPR manual. The problem with this is that emergencies instantly focus our intense attention but, afterward, when the societal adrenaline from the rescue effort ebbs, so does any thorough public pondering or accounting about how the way we live and consume and are organized contribute to creating these emergencies in the first place. What does get studied typically winds up as a 27-recommendation tome collecting dust somewhere, resurrected 10 or 20 years in the future as a curiosity for some columnist to highlight as what-could-have-been.

The possibilities emerging from flex moments such as Katrina and the BP gusher should be pounced on. “Don’t waste a crisis,” said Rahm Emanuel in the best sound bite I ever heard from him. Use this moment to do something big, something transformative for the Gulf, for the people, the ecology, the economy.

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EcoAdvocates: The Misfits

by soothsayer99

Tonight's EcoAdvocates edition includes posts by soothsayer99 on Mustangs and Burros Remain at Risk,and rb137 on Alaskan Wolves: Preditors or Prey.

MUSTANGS AND BURROS REMAIN AT RISK
by soothsayer99

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EcoAdvocates: Obama May Reverse Bush on Indigenous Rights

by Patriot Daily News Clearinghouse

Bush voted against UNDRIP (the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples) ostensibly because the declaration was subject to "conflicting interpretations and debate about its application" and therefore not "capable of implementation." If this standard applied to the U.S. Constitution, it would not exist.  

In reality, Bush did not like that UNDRIP recognizes a range of rights that address corporate and governmental plundering of resources as well as abuse and discrimination.

Elections have consequences.  President Obama recognizes that UNDRIP provides a framework for addressing the rights of indigenous peoples so he is now reviewing whether the U.S. should join 144 other countries with its endorsement.

Deadline for your two cents is tomorrow.

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EcoAdvocates: Gulf Tribes, Chemical Testing, Green Burials, Climate Justice, and Saving the Peaks

by Aji

While the Gulf Coast disaster continues apace, three small tribes and several groups and individuals focused on rescue and remediation need additional support.  New legislation has been introduced in the House and Senate to require more rigorous testing of chemicals; the Environmental Defense Fund wants your help in improving it.  You can join several efforts currently under way to save sacred lands in Northern Arizona from pollution by sewage effluent, and to help promote aggressive action on climate change.  And how would like to know that, when you "walk on," you're doing so in an environmentally friendly manner?  It's now possible.

Tonight's EcoAdvocates edition includes posts by Aji on The Gulf Tribes:  Rescuing Coastline and Cultures, Meteor Blades on The Safe Chemicals Act of 2010, Ojibwa on Green Burials, Boatsie with Take Action Alerts, and Oke with a special "Save the Peaks" Action Alert.

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EcoAdvocates: Wind Farms, Cities, & Urgent Action on Conflict Minerals and Burning Sea Turtles

by citisven

While no one technology or source of energy can or should claim to be the exclusive savior in our quest to find alternatives to fossil fuels, offshore wind power has moved beyond symbolic feelgood status and become one of the most promising contenders to be an economically viable source of energy.

Aside from the obvious environmental benefit that a malfunctioning turbine or platform doesn't annihilate entire ecosystems, windmill technology has come a long way since its early days. You know it's not just pretty talk when energy companies are investing billions in offshore wind parks. That's exactly what's happening in the North Sea, where major international power companies are currently staking out the future of Europe's energy supply off the coasts of Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, Ireland and Britain.  

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ecoadvocates: Join hands in fighting BP & Offshore

by boatsie

Tonight's EcoAdvocates edition includes a guest post by by Dave Rauschkolb, founder  of Hands Across the Sand , the June 26 day of solidarity on beaches around the world in response to the Deepwater Horizon Disaster; Kevin Grandia reporting from tcktcktck's FreshAir Center on "What's next after the UNFCCC Bonn talks?" and tonight's editor, boatsie, who provides background information and advocates for a few eco-actions in "Act Now!"

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EcoAdvocates: Fossil Fuel "Bombing" of Wildlife & Oceans

by Patriot Daily News Clearinghouse

Americans are horrified about the wildlife harmed by the BP Gulf disaster: Official count yesterday was 1,300 dead or injured. Watching the oil-saturated birds suffering in videos physically turned my stomach.  We know from Exxon Valdez that recovery rates are a small percent of the actual number of injured and dead wildlife, and this BP disaster is far from over. But, what about the harm from oceans filled with plastic bottles that are petroleum products? The swirling garbage gyres in the ocean look like a bomb exploded with varying sizes of plastic "shrapnel" that will kill wildlife. Each year globally plastic "kills more than 1 million sea birds and 100,000" whales, dolphins and seals. This is one issue where we can save lives by changing consumption patterns even if the government and corporations won't take action.

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EcoAdvocates: Obama's Climate Change Moment

by Patriot Daily News Clearinghouse

We need to hold BP accountable with various legal sanctions -- such as debarment, civil fines, civil lawsuits, and criminal prosecutions for real criminal offenses. Sanctions are needed for recovery, justice and deterrence of such inhumane, negligent and risky conduct by corporations given that we cannot commence living on alternative energies tomorrow. This Gulf Oil Gusher has shown to those who did not realize before that we cannot continue with an extreme fossil fuel energy policy. Public outrage helped convince President Obama to extend the offshore drilling moratorium. Today's EcoAdvocates focuses on the next step: Convincing President Obama to strengthen the climate change bill to provide a real path forward.  This is a message bloggers can send DC everyday. Tonight's EcoAdvocates edition includes posts by Bill McKibben on Now's the moment for President Obama, A Siegel on The Climate Mitigation Procrastination Storm and some take-action items.

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EcoAdvocates: Where the Buffalo Don't Yet Roam

by Meteor Blades

"The buffalo are disappearing rapidly, but not faster than I desire. I regard the destruction of such game as Indians subsist upon as facilitating the policy of the Government, of destroying their hunting habits, coercing them on reservations, and compelling them to begin to adopt the habits of civilization."   – Secretary of the Interior Columbus Delano, Testimony to Congress, 1874 The Wasichus [white men] did not kill them to eat, they killed them for the metal that makes them crazy, and they took only the hides to sell. Sometimes they did not even take the hides, only the tongues. You can see that the men who did this were crazy. Sometimes they did not even take the tongues; they just killed and killed because they liked to do that. When we hunted bison, we killed only what we needed. And when there was nothing left but heaps of bones, the Wasichus came and gathered up even the bones and sold them."   – Lakota shaman Black Elk in Black Elk Speaks, 1932 By 1870, the great herds of buffalo, or American Bison, that had in the 1500s roamed everywhere except present-day New England, were limited to 11 Western states and territories. There were still millions of them, perhaps 40 million. The massive slaughter that began in earnest in 1874 ended nine years later. By 1890, only 500 bison remained, and the devastated, decimated tribes who had depended on them were confined to reservations. Today, there are around 400,000 fenced bison in commercial herds, most of them genetically intermixed with cattle breeds and sold for meat domestically and abroad. But over the past 23 years, there has been a movement to repopulate the lightly populated areas of the West with vast new herds of genetically pure bison. That idea began with Deborah Epstein Popper and Frank J. Popper in a 1987 article in Planning, The Great Plains: From Dust to Dust.

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